Jurasz Hospital Installs Fujitsu PRIMERGY Servers and ETERNUS Storage

"Thanks to Fujitsu, we don’t need to focus on firefighting individual servers. Everything can be controlled from one single, unified dashboard while issues are highlighted early and can be simply located and resolved"

Maciej Pieczka,
IT Manager, Jurasz Hospital

The customer

Established in 1836, the Dr Anthony Jurasz University Hospital in Bydgoszcz is the largest public health service in the Kujawsko-Pomorskie region of Poland, treating over 40,000 inpatients and more than 200,000 outpatients every year. In addition to highly specialized medical procedures, its task as a university hospital involves training postgraduate medical staff, as well as scientific and research activity. The hospital has 25 clinics and departments, 8 plants, a Specialist Clinic team and employs over 2,500 people.

The challenge

In the highly sensitive hospital environment, it is imperative that patient records and core systems are always available, however, the hospital had grown organically over the years and its IT infrastructure had evolved in a piecemeal fashion. There were 20 different IT systems operating independently without any central management. Unsurprisingly, this created significant challenges for the IT team who were faced with handling individual servers from various vendors using different operating systems.

“Our IT infrastructure must work without failure but it was divided into small pieces each with its own server and storage. This created a lot of work but no-one could figure out the bigger picture and see how we could better integrate the entire system,” explains Maciej Pieczka, IT Manager, Jurasz Hospital. “We wanted to overhaul everything in order to make it easier to manage, more cost-effective and less of a burden on the IT staff. We also wanted to reduce our power consumption and provide better support in case of failure.”

The hospital wanted an integrated, flexible solution on which it could rely. Working within strict public sector procurement guidelines, the team visited other public organizations of similar size to see what comparable solutions were in place. It also tested a number of blade server and storage systems for performance. Having drawn up the specifications for the new architecture, several vendors were invited to tender a solution. Fujitsu was selected based on cost and ability to meet the demands.

“Fujitsu was clearly able to rise to the challenge we set out within a budget that satisfied the procurement people,” adds Maciej Pieczka. “Having fine-tuned the proposal, we were ready to get to work.”

The solution

Working together over a period of five months, Fujitsu and the hospital created two server rooms connected by a fiber channel network. In the first, nine Fujitsu PRIMERGY BX900 blade servers are complemented with an ETERNUS DX410 S2 SAN storage array; the second room consists of four blade servers and an ETERNUS DX90 S2 acting as a mirror for disaster recovery. The team implemented Fujitsu ServerView® Resource Orchestrator VE to guarantee optimal availability.

Fujitsu ServerView® Resource Orchestrator VE consolidates resources into virtualized pools and then provides self-service functions that enable automatic deployment and operation of virtual platforms in response to user requests. The software also enables efficient platform operation, by allowing the hospital to visualize the usage and status of their specific resources.

“We migrated our applications and data step by step so as not to disrupt the running of the hospital. Services included the hospital information system, ERP, Business Intelligence, reporting services and many small Java applications developed in-house,” continues Maciej Pieczka. “There were also Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL databases, patient databases and time management applications. These are now all hosted on up to 40 virtual machines provided by Hyper-V.”

The benefit

One unified central control panel makes managing the system simple and transparent, saving time for the IT team

Increased reliability has reduced the amount of downtime dramatically, making users more productive

Energy consumption has been reduced because all the components draw power from the integrated blade system

Issues are alerted early and quickly solved without disrupting the business

The IT department was instantly struck by how much easier the new system is to manage: “We don’t need to focus on firefighting individual servers, which frees up our time for more strategic activity. Everything can be controlled from one single, unified dashboard; issues are highlighted early and can be simply located and resolved. Switching to the backup system is also a fast and straightforward task.”

From a user perspective, the experience has improved immensely as errors and incidents can be addressed without the need for downtime. This added stability has led to increased productivity. The solution is also reducing energy consumption because all the components – from node servers and fiber switches to the management panel – draw power from the integrated blade system.

“Previously, the primary, critical services would go down from time to time causing disruption for users and making our lives stressful. Now, we enjoy a stable, secure platform with maximum uptime and minimal stress,” says Maciej Pieczka. “Deploying new applications is also simple and we can hot-plug new hardware easily without having to reconfigure physical network addresses. This all makes for a better performing, better controlled platform.”

Conclusion

With the new server rooms up and running, Maciej Pieczka is looking at other areas where Fujitsu can help. One particular department is Radiology, where demand for storage is intense.

“We’ve bought new medical hardware recently for the Radiology department and that is generating lots of new data-rich images and X-Rays,” concludes Maciej Pieczka. “We’ll need to expand the existing storage solution and naturally we’ll invite Fujitsu to offer advice.

“Partnering with Fujitsu has been a seamless, collaborative process without any problems. From my experience, compared to other vendors, Fujitsu solutions look good, work well and are the most competitive in terms of price.”